Buddhist mobs attack Muslim properties despite curfew in Sri Lanka

Violent Buddhist mobs have rampaged through Muslim neighborhoods in Sri Lanka's central hills despite heavy police presence and a curfew, destroying businesses and setting homes ablaze.

The mobs in the tiny town of Pallekele ignored a state of emergency declared by police to keep them off the streets, using gasoline bombs to set four homes on fire, local resident Mohamed Nazar told Associated Press on Thursday.

According to Nazar, an angry crowd gathered around his home around 8 p.m. on Wednesday, shouting and throwing rocks, prompting the family to turn off lights so the mobs could not see the interior of the house.

"Then a large flame came and the house caught fire," Nazar added, noting that he had to grab his old father and run out. Though local authorities eventually distinguished the fire, much of his family’s possessions were ruined.

"We can't trust the army and police. My shop has been attacked in their presence and I don't know what could happen tonight," said another resident identified as Mohamed Faraz, whose butcher's shop was looted and torn apart.

The government declared a state of emergency on Tuesday and later shut down popular social media networks, insisting that they were being used to spread false rumors that provoked the attacks.

"Technology created to bring people together is being used to pull people apart," Sri Lanka’s Technology Minister Harin Fernando said, adding that social media websites such as Facebook, Whatsapp and Viber had been used to destroy families, lives and private property.

Some believe the violence is rooted in the spread of hardline Buddhism, manifested in an ongoing wave of "ethnic cleansing" in Myanmar.

Many residents of the area around the main hill town of Kandy described a chain of similar attacks since the brutal violence started earlier in the week.

As evening began to fall Thursday, many Muslim residents worried that darkness could bring more attacks, with police officers doing very little to halt the violence.

The South Asian country faces a bitter ethnic divide between the majority Sinhalese and the minority Tamils, following a decades-long civil war as Tamil militants sought to establish their own homeland.

Sinhalese are overwhelmingly Buddhists, while Tamils are mostly Hindu, Muslim and Christian.

Since the war ended in 2009, a religious divide has increased with the rise of Buddhist nationalist groups which have been stirring up anger against Muslims, claiming that they were stealing from Buddhist temples or desecrating them, and even forcing people to convert to Islam.

Muslims own many of Sri Lanka's small shops, and suspect small-town jealousy behind the attacks.

For now, violence and the heavy police presence is largely limited to Sri Lanka's central hills, with the capital Colombo and other cities and towns experiencing few, if any, signs of trouble.

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